The Animation Student
A blog about the neverending learning process in Animation
A blog about the neverending learning process in Animation
heya! no problem! i love answering questions that may help! yes i do have an art degree, but since it was not close to animation, i got an ma in animation too I got my gigs as storyboard artist by making a story portfolio i would be feel comfortable showing around and applying, and keep practicing… it means by making storyboards all the time, lots of them..and by also taking part of other parts of the animation process, after all it is a team sport :O The path to become a sboard artist is really different for each person, and for me, it mostly depends on where in the world you are, if you can work in big studios or move close to them , if you get into your local industry…that kind of stuff, if it is a small studio you may need to know other aspects of production such as design and actual animation. Most people won't need an ma, BUT it is necessary for you to have storyboards to show for applying to jobs. Also, you gotta think about starting from the beginning (aka as a revisionist or assistant)… ..but mostly, for being a storyboard artist you gotta truly focus on the story part of it. “why things happen and how to show it the clearest way possible” Most senior storyboard artists and directors i have talked to do not care much if you have AMAZING illustrations if they cant see the potential storytelling…still It requires drawing A LOT so it is a plus if you are clearly comfortable with it i am here to help! if you have any more questions about any part of it, it’s cool! i can talk all day about storyboards …, since..it is my big passion :> Sometimes I get questions in my art blog about studying animation and being a storyboard artist.
Francesca and Lizbeth – Puzzle Pieces
Storyboard Pro - TVPaint Direction, Production and Storyboard: Luisa Cruz (2nd year MA Animation) Animation and Character Design: Vasilena Kavanozova (Level 3 Animation), Victoria Povey (Level 3 Animation) What the animators say about the piece: "The conversation between the two mothers gives us an insight about their experience and after sharing their points of view it leaves us feeling uplifted. As we aimed to show precisely this in the animation we made the little birds complement each other and at the end fit perfectly under their mother wings as they shared a warm and fluffy hug." http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05mww3n
When I was given the opportunity to have another brief with Childrens in Need Charity and the BBC radio, I was heads on to making it. Practice is important not only in the technical aspects of animation but also at the moment of facing a production. Bsides, being a brief with only one month to get the animation to screen I was sure to be able to accomplish it if I followed a fitting schedule.
For this project I also worked in a team with two animators from third year, and assumed the role of director. At this point I already had experience doing several aspects of a production and since I had a deadline clear I organized every single task for the animators to be able to focus on animating. In our production meetings we discussed aspects of the work like design and story, and by the moment the animatic was ready, I jumped directly to work on the backgrounds and preparing the file for the final edition. Was the kind of project that requires a steady pipeline to be able to deliver what we already had promised to the BBC. In both briefs for the BBC many groups dropped in the middle of the production for not being able to finish it but personally, the experience to bringing something to screen is far more valuable as it shows the organization and the ability to compromise to the ones that made it possible to complete the animation in such a short time. The experience of being a director was important in many aspects, one of them being that one of the future developments in a storyboard artists career is becoming director themselves and, in the guiding environment of the academia, it was the safest way for me to try this role I feel is too far from where I am standing right now. My major difficulty was communicating with the other team members as someone in charge, to be able to drive exactly what I envisioned and, as ALSO a flaw in my storyboard skills, is also not in the animatic. Even with the stressful nature of directing a short, I tried to apply what other with more experience directing told me. Having people to ask for advice in this aspect was one of the reasons we could deliver the animation. Most of the artists I reached work on projects or have online platforms that I have followed for a while. Others were recommended to me. I wrote to fifteen people and received answers from eight of them. After speaking with them, the main lesson was an obvious one: storyboard artists work in all of the fields of visual media. Adaptability is necessary to work on the field, because the size of the crew, the production needs and the resources vary wildly among short films, tv shows, feature films and advertising for different media. Even if my main goal is to be able to work in a studio based job, I know I must learn about the characteristics of freelance jobs, since they make up for a great percentage of the offer. The questions I send to them where: •What was your first job in the industry? How did you get to work as a storyboard artist? •What kind of technology do you work with on a daily basis? •What kind of additional skills may help a storyboard artist working in animation? •How do you approach scripts? is it any different for short projects than for big ones? And in the case of the directors: how their role as storyboard artists influence their role as directors. Key points I found are: •Each project is unique, therefore it must be approached with a brand new mindset. The job of a storyboard artist is to figure out the specific requirements of the story and the clearest way to satisfy them visually. •Each director approaches projects in a different way and the crew operates differently according to this approach. The storyboard artist must be able to adapt and take the best of every new experience. •Type casting is a real thing in the industry. In some features, the storyboard artist is picked to plan a specific scene that requires high skill in action or drama expression, other times, it is more about the general feeling of the entire project. •Related to this, it is vital that the storyboard artist and the director understand each other. •Storyboard is all about planning and a storyboard artist needs to keep all the aspects of storytelling in mind for being able to deliver. Acting, colour, composition, cuts. All must be clear in the storyboard and come natural to the storyboard artists, which is why having experience in several projects is important. Storyboard notes come very handy. •It is important to question everything that is going to be shown to the audience: why the director wants it to be like it is, which is the best way to show it, how will the material get clear enough to make the cut. •The simpler the better. •Mastery comes from practice and experimentation. It is essential to try different scripts, techniques and audiences, as well as studying composition and narration in finished products like movies, ads and TV shows. •Most of the interviewees work digitally, using mainly Adobe Photoshop and Toon Boom Storyboard Pro. Some of them consider the proficiency in the latter a requirement to work as a studio artist in the industry. •The length of a project can go from one or two days for advertising, to two or three years for feature films. •Newcomers normally get jobs as revisionists, where they help tying up the storyboard artist’s work with the director final needs. It is a great way to enter the industry because one can see the storyboards from professional artists and listen to the director’s commentary first hand. I looked up for the requirements big studios have for their storyboard artists, what do they want to see in a portfolio and which skills they appreciate in an animator too, because I got from the interviews that several storyboard artists also work as animators or even concept artists and character designers. They definitely need that the storyboard artist understands the pipeline and commits to make it flow, since a production is a team effort to put a finished product on screen and the storyboard artist is one of the critical pieces in the functioning of this mechanism. The pipeline is the tool to understand the whole process and define who needs to work at every step of it. With it, the storyboard artist can manage to make the blueprints to all the departments in time and assure everything goes as planned and the studio can be sure their money is not going to waste. Behind the scenes documentaries for feature films are great to see this in detail, since they show how the work of the storyboard artists intertwines with the rest of the crew and how different studios approach the challenges of production. Cartoon Network, Pixar and Dreamworks have information about this online for everyone to see The conclusion: For being a successful artist in an industry means to be able to develop a critical eye on your own work and how it is serving to your purpose as a visual artist. For me, the way to achieve this was to realize that I am on an entry level on the industry and the people that would hire me knows that. It means that I have to be incredible perceptive and actively look for feedback from people working on animation. Many established artist on the industry count with years of experience to have a signature style, and knowing that even if that is one of the characteristics of successful artists, they also count with the time and experience to develop it and to keep growing as artists.
Composer: RockeyKeting
Animators : Karolina Bielskyte ,LuisaCruz, AlexCoad, EwanSchwarz. Location: Shoreditch Town Hall, THE DITCH, Old Document Store Running time: 1:30s. Our video projection idea is based on the door that leads from Old Document Store to Rivington Room. We used this opportunity and create a site-specific animation that was projected on top of the Old Document Store door and the sidewall with element from the Bauhaus art movement. The annual collaborative project with the Royal Academy of Music which involves collaborating with composers to realize a site specific experimental music film. The project was based in the Three Penny Opera from 1928. We used two projectors to cover the wall with the door and the corner of the wall on the right.
I had the experience of my grad project which was a two video Installation Art.
all the info about that one is here: CATS MAKE YOU WANT TO STAY IN (2015)
Space
Storyboard
Animatic
Installation
I’ve always knew I was interested in narration through images, being this the center of my practice for many years. This is why my research into the animation world started from knowing what role in the immense pipeline intersection my innate interest in drawing belonged to. My final decision of becoming a storyboard artist for animation came after a long process of first, to understand how things actually work in the animation industry; second, to explore the scope that the different positions in an animation crew have, so I could see in which one I could really feel satisfied; and third, to identify the type of projects I would like to be part of. But it is, as alway,s a decisions that should be made alongside practice considering that in a creative career is not only important to know the aspects of the work but also to have the experience of doing it. My initial research led me to find information first hand, communicating with storyboard artist from around the world via email, about what is to be a storyboard artist in the industry. WIthout leaving aside other tools like books such as Levy, D.B. (2006) Your Career in Animation, and even more online resources like Creative Skillset (2016) Animation Job Roles (animation) and the pages of the same animation companies, they usually have no secrets about what they aspire to get from someone applying to any of the different roles in their studios. After coming through with my initial research on how the animation industry works ,my idea of storyboard changed and I started to perceive the possibility of a professional development in this area. For being a storyboard artist in animation, generating clear images for the rest of the team to work from is a priority. For this reason, as Richard Williams says in his book The animator’s survival kit (Williams 2001, p. 23) “Drawing should become second nature, so that the animator can concentrate on the actual actions and the timing of them and give the performance life”.
Getting started with storyboards is not exactly easy, since there is not just one way to do storyboards. They are made for the production you are in and they all change with the type of production. That is why this is a great book to get into the technicality of storyboarding. Bold, incredibly graphic with illustrated examples and to the point. This is part of the content list:
Personal Highlights.
3 weeks project to make an hybrid 1 minute animation short between 3 people. It must include DEATH PRE PRODUCTION
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